Showing Tag: "south dakota" (Show all posts)

My Favorite National Parks of the West

Posted by Jason Hussong on Wednesday, September 14, 2011,

It is no secret that I love the national parks of the United States. I make it a point to go to as many as I can each year, driving to most thanks to my parallel love of road trips. And after seeing so many impressive places through the years, I figured it was high time I put together a list of the locations in the western United States which touched me the most. The impressive natural beauty, peaceful nature, and uniqueness of these spots ...

A National Parks Pass Review

Posted by Jason Hussong on Tuesday, July 27, 2010,

A year ago I purchased an annual pass for the U.S. National Park Service, (left) and made it a

point to hit as many places as I could during the life of the pass. I wanted to get out and experience more of the natural world around me, as well as learn about the history of important events and places that I maybe didn't know about before I purchased my pass. Some of the places I had visited before, like Rocky Mountain National Park (above)here in Colorado, but overall I'd give it the big ol...

The Wall Drug Store

Posted by Jason Hussong on Monday, October 26, 2009,

I could swear that Wall Drug has billboards up advertising their free ice water as far away as Alaska. The number of highway signs they have is truly insanely astonishing and in every other way mind boggling. I'm not sure there's a road into or out of South Dakota that doesn't bear at least one of their advertisements. And no matter which direction from Wall Drug I drove I still seemed to see them.

As I planned my roadtrip I initially had no inclination to make a stop at the nucleus of ...

The Badlands National Park

Posted by Jason Hussong on Thursday, October 8, 2009,

As I sat in my hotel room the night before my visit, I was really excited about doing a couple of hikes at the Badlands National Park. I had a ton of pages I printed out in preparation for my visit spread across the bed as I watched some television and devoured a pizza. I meticulously highlighted the trails I wanted to visit, but it turns out everything I was told about the Badlands was just a bunch of hype.

The park is essentially a drive. There are some pretty good hikes to do in the ...

Mt. Rushmore at Night

Posted by Jason Hussong on Tuesday, September 29, 2009,

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American People.

~ George Washington, first inaugural address, April 30, 1789

I bought my annual National Park pass this year because I knew I'd be hitting a lot of the great places across the United States. It would've been nice had someone told me though that Mt. Rushmore wasn't ...

The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site

Posted by Jason Hussong on Friday, September 11, 2009,

"A nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high Cyclone fence; but to the imagination, it is the end of the world." ~ Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989

I studied a lot of Cold War history, particularly from the Soviet side, in high school and college. Looking back on those days, I think they helped ma...